


die with your mask on (if you've got to)

by kamisado



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canonical Child Abuse, Character Study, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-23
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:35:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26071993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kamisado/pseuds/kamisado
Summary: Diego’s long since learned that heroes are always bound by something. They always have some fatal flaw, some arbitrary Kryptonite to keep them in check. At Holbrook they told him it was his opposition to authority, his inability to let things go without a fight. But deep down, he knows it’s his unwavering belief that there’s justice in the world, that some good will come of all of this, even when every day is hell-bent on proving him wrong.[a diego character study]
Relationships: Diego Hargreeves/Eudora Patch, Diego Hargreeves/Lila Pitts
Comments: 10
Kudos: 68





	die with your mask on (if you've got to)

**Author's Note:**

> title taken from 'jet-star and the kobra kid/traffic report' by my chemical romance
> 
> content warnings for: physical injury, self-harm, institutionalization

In some form or another, Diego had spent most of his life in an institution. From the sprawling halls of home, to the sweat-slick police academy, to the piss-stained despair of a jail cell, his life was punctuated by men telling him what to do, that he wasn’t good enough. Men he could take in a fair fight, but would never fight fair.

Holbrook Sanatorium is not an entirely new beast. The endless scrape of Dr Moncton’s pen in group and the thinly-veiled glances of disappointment make Diego’s skin crawl. There’s regimens and rules, and the deadweight of ever-present observation. Lila’s flighty and unpredictable and _loud_ in a way that almost reminds him of Klaus, keeps things just that little bit interesting, but for all intents and purposes, he might as well be back in the Academy.

Diego tucks the pills under his tongue, spits them into his hand to slide into potted plants and down u-bends. He keeps quiet as much as he can, learns the hard way what happens when he doesn’t, and swipes every vaguely robust object he can find to whittle down the bars on his window. 

The days and weeks drip by in a malaise pock-marked by fluorescent lights. There’s only one thing he could possibly be in 1963 for, the greatest injustice he could possibly think of. The thought consumes him whole, occupies his every waking moment, stops him thinking about everything he’s lost to get to this point. He’s there to stop something terrible happening to the most important person in the country. It’s the right thing to do. 

And all of this, the training, the vigilantism, the overwhelming loss that threatens to drown him if he thinks too hard about it, if he can just save one person— 

It’ll finally be worth it.

* * *

He doesn’t expect Five to support him, or even really to understand, but ten minutes ago he thought he was the only member of the Academy to make it here alive, and now there’s a too-big dose of sedative forced into his arm and he barely has time to flinch at the sight of the needle, because he can’t take his eyes off his bastard brother.

* * *

Dulled, dizzy and nauseous, he still knows exactly how to get out of a straitjacket in under a minute flat - _right shoulder ‘cus you’re a southpaw, hard blow downwards, just don’t think about it, don’t_ \- because it seems old habits are all he has these days. The slick-sick _pop_ and white-hot pain, out of practice but the ritual still familiar. He wonders what else he’s learned as a child, just barely hidden below the surface ready to reappear at a moment’s notice. 

He can barely walk in a straight line, is seconds away from having his jaw broken - _just like Klaus all those years ago, oh God_ \- and then Lila’s there, ready to drag him back to the real world. He wants to stand and fight, but the sedatives still hum in his veins and warp the edges of his vision.

For the first time since he found himself in 1963, someone’s got his back. Lila takes his hand, and pulls him to safety.

* * *

He doesn’t see who the dark figure is at first, only that they’re a threat. The combat is a refreshing change of pace to the brute-force blows on the way out of Holbrook. This opponent is fast, skillful, but Diego is opportunistic, and he’s done fighting fair. He grabs the steel rod, ready to deliver the final blow. He prides himself on never flinching in the face of violence, but he’s not a total monster. Later, he’ll tell himself that’s why he paused when he saw his father’s face staring up at him, seconds away from a bludgeoning.

It’s always the quiet words that punch the air from his lungs, the ones that echo in his mind as night closes in, but it’s the blade to the gut that gets him first.

 _Amateur,_ his father says, his tone marked only by its ambivalence. The knife twists on its way out. Reginald Hargreeves melts into the night, hand-in-hand with Pogo, and Diego barely feels himself hit the ground. Blood pools around him, warm and terrifying, and he tries to remember if his father had ever reached out to him with such fatherly affection. He knows it’s a waste of energy to even try.

* * *

Lila holds the soldering iron to the gaping gut wound - _a coward’s shot_ \- until he passes out. It feels like love.

* * *

_He probably didn’t know that you were his son when he shanked you,_ she says later in the sickly neon light of a sixties shop-front sign, and where chronology’s concerned, she’s right, of course she is.

He traces her arm with fingertips and wonders how much more he can tell her before she bolts. Just like her, there are things he’d never talked about in group, things he could barely articulate to himself. Things his siblings could only guess at when he’d emerge from one-to-one training with his father, with hollow eyes and angry slash wounds.

The gut wound drags him awake to an empty bed with its dull angry pulse. He’d always slept light, hand on the blade under his pillow an insurance policy from a too-early age. There was something about the wounds he’d get in a fight that would give him a sick sense of satisfaction; the idea he’d put himself in harm’s way for a purpose so much greater than his own feelings. 

He knows that’s what their wretched father would want them to think. _Take pride in your battle scars_ would be the kind of bullshit he’d announce while they stitched up each other’s injuries at the dining table with shaky hands and glistening eyes. But today’s injury is nothing more than a testament to his own failures, and those are the scabs always hardest to leave alone.

Diego’s long since learned that heroes are always bound by something. They always have some fatal flaw, some arbitrary Kryptonite to keep them in check. At Holbrook they told him it was his opposition to authority, his inability to let things go without a fight. But deep down, he knows it’s his unwavering belief that there’s justice in the world, that some good will come of all of this, even when every day is hell-bent on proving him wrong.

* * *

_With your background, you’d have thought you could follow a simple order,_ his captain had screamed, purple-cheeked and jowls shaking.

Textbook dereliction of duty. Diego had acted without thinking, rushed out to apprehend a perp. His partner was too slow, too timid to catch up. They were still trainees, sure, but Diego knew this guy would get away if they waited for backup, and he wasn’t willing to let that happen. The order to wait had come over the crackly police scanner, but he was already half-way down the street by the time it had come through.

Maybe if this had been his first offense, maybe if his partner hadn’t been pistol-whipped by the perp’s accomplice, Diego would have got away with a slapped wrist. But they all knew his face from the TV, couldn’t help but overhear the rivalry between him and Patch. He was too visible, too volatile to be allowed loose on the streets, they said.

Behind the bulging bloodshot of his captain’s eyes was his father, and all he wanted to do was scream back, every bitter unfiltered word he’d said when he was seventeen and decided there was no point sticking around.

But he couldn’t articulate what he wanted to say, couldn’t shape the words right in his mouth. No savage riposte, not even a meagre unfeeling apology.

_I don’t-_

_I-_

He leaves silently, in disgrace.

* * *

He sees his mother across the room at the Mexican Consulate, and his heart leaps into his mouth.

She thinks he’s crazy, because of course she does, because everything about this whole situation is crazy. Standing before him is his mother, who held him when he cried, and cooked and cleaned and cared for him for seventeen years. His mother, the robot, who he killed, and couldn’t save, the most important person in his life who he failed time and time again. 

But this Grace before him is a real breathing woman, with a glint in her eye and a Texas sweetheart drawl, and as much as he wants her approval, he can’t stop thinking about what his father had done to her since.

Diego tries to warn her that her lover is dangerous, can’t bear the thought of his wretched father hurting this charming woman and replacing her with a robot to serve. In the dead of night, he wonders if the warning worked, or merely precipitated her fate. He hopes the real Grace is still out there in 2019, an elderly spurned ex-girlfriend of Reginald Hargreeves, who had heard the worst from a stranger and fled.

But Diego knows his father too well to have any faith in his clemency.

* * *

Days after Ben’s death, he had reached breaking point. The grueling training, the bruises and barked orders felt like going through the motions. Their lives were just that bit more expendable, the chaos of the universe that much closer and crueler.

Such a pretense of ordinary life had culminated in a screaming match in the foyer, although Diego was the only one screaming. He barely remembered what he said, until he read it years later in Vanya’s book.

_You let Ben die, you let Five go, do we mean nothing to you?_

_You treated us like a fucking experiment — worse than fucking animals!_

_We were just kids!_

He had been inconsolable, hysterical to the point of tears. His remaining siblings watched on from the mezzanine, a silent Greek chorus unwilling to join the fray. He would always remember looking up at them, for some sign of agreement, some show of support that he wasn’t alone. But they all turned from him, ashamed, almost embarrassed for him as they averted their eyes. His father only spoke to cut him off from the Academy there and then. 

_You are a reckless, arrogant disappointment._

Evidently, the old man thought a brief spell on the streets would teach Diego some respect. But all it did was teach him how to hustle, how to put aside any dignity to scrape together every cent, and how to plead when rent inevitably came up short.

 _I will help people, and I will do it on my terms,_ he thinks, lying across a park bench that night. The thought blazes in his heart, an ember-glow of hope. Despite it all, he smiles.

_And all of this will be worth it._

* * *

The Tiki Lounge reeks of rum and pineapple, and the circular table gives the pretense of equality, but the second their father takes a seat, they might as well be in the dining room at the Academy. Paterfamilias at the head of the table. The Umbrella Academy, together again, present a united front for the first time in too long, but their father always did know how to tear them apart with terrible precision. 

Diego knows he should have seen it coming, but he can’t stop himself from speaking up, and his father takes deadly aim. 

_You fancy yourself a do-gooder? The last good man who will save us from our descent into corruption and conspiracy? This is a fantastic delusion._

He’s been called deluded before, by psychiatrists and police alike, but this was their shared delusion the world bought into when they were kids. The idea of a child crime-fighting team was his father’s idea, always acting on their father’s orders, righting whatever wrong he told them to fix. 

_The sad reality is that you're a desperate man, tragically unaware of his own insignificance, desperately clinging to his own ineffectual reasoning._

Diego tries not to think too hard about his own code of honor because if he held it up to the light, he would find his father’s own black and white concepts of right and wrong. From birth, Reginald Hargreeves had taught them not to trust their own minds, instead trust his, for he would show them the right way to behave. Diego knows if his reasoning’s ineffectual, his father only has himself to blame.

_More succinctly, a man in over his head._

The sanitorium had done their best to unpick him, but they were nowhere near the precise evisceration his father delivered, with the rhetorical gusto that rattled his thoughts at night. Diego tries to summon his bravado, but his hands shake, and when he opens his mouth, he’s betrayed by the way his throat closes.

 _You’re wr-wrong,_ he forces out, but the damage is already done.

* * *

_Why do you always have to fight?_ Patch had asked on the steps of the precinct, the cardboard box in Diego’s hands threatening to disintegrate in the pouring rain. _I don’t know what to tell you,_ he’d replied, unable to look her in the eye. Shame burned like magma in his throat; fight or flight had never been a choice to him. 

Patch had been the first person to show him that his life was so much bigger than just his surname and his number. She was sharp as a tack, articulate and fair-minded. She’d listened to the tales of his childhood, albeit heavily redacted, and was the first to pull him up when his self-loathing threatened to swallow them both whole. For eighteen sweet months, they’d had their moments as a picture book couple, morning coffee and sunny-side eggs, dancing in the kitchen to stupid songs on the radio like nothing in the world mattered.

He didn’t know how to tell her he’d been fighting for so long he didn’t even realize he was doing it anymore. When every passing shadow or creak in the floorboard might herald imminent pain, your body reacts before your brain has a chance to catch up. She’d had the patience of a saint when he woke with screaming nightmares, didn’t ask too many questions about his scars, only had the faintest knowledge of his childhood in the spotlight.

 _I can’t keep doing this, Diego,_ she’d said, her hand on his cheek in gentle supplication. She made the world seem that much brighter, kinder, in a way he never could have seen in the blood and brutality behind the walls of the Academy. He tried so hard to see that world too, but there was so much he could never explain to her. 

She had her way of doing things, and he had his. They had argued viciously in the academy, bitter and competitive, and put aside their differences to kiss on the doorstep. She had been his first friend, with her strong handshake and tight ponytail on the first day of training and since then, she’d arrested him plenty of times, and turned a blind eye plenty more. He rarely knew what he was doing, but he knew he would do anything for her. 

On the porch of her fancy house, where he slept the night after he’d killed his mother, he tried to make her understand, one last time.

_You know, maybe for once, just try things my way._

He finds her dead, face-down in a motel room, with a bullet in her back.

* * *

The coffin is empty. Ben’s face stares placidly at the blank sky overhead, blocked out by an expanse of black umbrellas. 

_Hold onto this feeling, children._

Because they had failed Ben, and by bickering and infighting they’d taken their eyes off him at the crucial moment when he needed someone to come to his aid. Diego had just assumed that Ben would cope, they were all wrapped up in their own struggles that they didn’t even notice right away that Ben was gone.

_Let it fester in your hearts…_

“It wasn’t anybody’s fault,” Vanya says, because that’s the kind of thing you have to say to something like that, but she wasn’t there, she didn’t know what it was like to turn back and there’s only scraps of uniform and a gaping void where your brother had torn himself apart because there was nobody there to calm him down, to bring him back from that terrible place in his mind where his power always sent him.

_So there is never a next time._

Ben’s death had been nobody’s fault, and everybody’s fault. 

Diego celebrates his eighteenth birthday in a damp box-room with a dislocated shoulder and a broken nose, and presses crumpled dollar bills into a tear in his mattress. If he can just make it to the police academy, if he can keep fighting every bad guy he can find, on the streets, in the boxing ring—

* * *

_I know what it’s like to love dangerous people._

Lila’s quick with her words and her insults, so confident and strange that he can’t tear his eyes away. There’s a practiced ease to the way she fights, on instinct more than anything else, her emotions pressed so deep he’s not sure whether to trust anything she says.

Her mother had turned her into a weapon, strong and sharp, warped and distrustful. In her vicious retorts, her reckless blows, he sees his younger self, all jagged sharp edges badly coated with a brittle veneer. He knows all too well what it’s like to be used for someone else’s power trip, to be manipulated to the point where you can’t even trust yourself.

His siblings look back at him, bright and beautiful individuals, so much more than the numbers and masks crafted by their father. They look on in silent support, trusting him. For the first time in a long time, he feels truly loved.

He steps towards Lila’s blade; it presses against his chest. She doesn’t want to trust him, but he’ll offer her the world. He knows all too well what this feels like.

_Difference is, they love me back._

Her adoptive mother is gunned down before her, a sick circle of history. She runs, because that’s what she’s always done, and he can’t blame her. But he presses her beaded bracelet from Holbrook into his pocket, the one with the shitty knots he couldn’t fix straight, a memory from a million years ago. He’s sure they’ll meet again someday.

* * *

Despite it all, Diego can see why Vanya had spent her time hiding out at the farmhouse. In the failing light of a November dusk, facing down the forest with the battlefield behind, it’s almost beautiful. He’d shaped his life around fighting back, defined himself in opposition to what unjust men would want of him. He’d raged against the world too long, hated himself and everything around him. Out here, he was free. They were all free. The cool air catches in his throat like a sob.

But he knows they can’t stay here. Hand-in-hand, they hurtle from the dark cold night of 1963, and atomize across time, the Umbrella Academy together again. Friends, equals, siblings.

They find themselves in a building Diego had last seen in ash and ruin. Their father is alive and furious; the walls, pristine and imposing. 

It feels as much like a cage as it ever did.


End file.
